Destroyer of Worlds
by Ellie12
Summary: Post-"Lysergic Acid Diethylamide".  Peter ponders fate, death, and the end of the world.


**Title:** Destroyer of Worlds**  
>Author:<strong> Ellie**  
>Rating: <strong>PG13**  
>Spoilers:<strong> Post-"Lysergic Acid Diethylamide" (3.19) with a possible vague foreshadowing of 3.20**  
>Summary: <strong>Peter ponders fate, death, and the end of the world.

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><p>She does not fear death, but I do. I know I must become death, my own and others, as surely as I know I love her. That knowledge weighs heavy as I sit and watch her, sprawled on the bed, limbs akimbo and tangled in her soft sheets. There is a peace about her I haven't seen before, as if she's easier in her own skin; after a day in her mind, I wonder how she can ever be so.<p>

I have seen men claim they do not fear death, bearing arms and hidden weapons. They have claimed their cause just, have been willing to martyr themselves, accepting it, dying willingly. I never understood, because while I heard their bravado, I saw the flicker in their eyes in their eyes as they spoke, under the righteous fire, their proclaimed willingness to die for God and country, gold and opium. As they died, all I saw was the fear.

There was no trace of fear in her face as she spoke of her death.

All I can see is the dark saltire on the man's chest, and blueprints of myself, spread-eagle like Saint Andrew, in the Machine. The consensus seems to be that it will, through means unknown, bring about the end of the world as we know it, with my involvement. Will it destroy me too, as I hang in it like some Vitruvian crucifixion? Will it destroy her? I know she would understand the necessity, and she would let me, but it would break her heart, and mine.

Would it break more of her than her heart? The way she's laying now, sprawled, reminds me of too many visions of the end of the world by other men in other times. Sad, thin, tortured men and women, sorted and fated on the tympanum of gothic cathedrals. Twisted, anguished souls captured on Rodin's bronze doors. The glorious salvation and eternal damnation of a Michelangelo fresco. I've seen it all, believed in the possibility not because of a faith in God, but because too many times, I've looked the devil in the eye. You only experience that so many times before you come to a reckoning, and I'm no saint. I'm no devil, either, and I can't wrap my mind around the idea of being the impetus for such calamity.

If that doomsday machine causes some reckoning and realigning of the universes, how can it end in anything but utter annihilation? How can I accept that task, destroying the world as I know it? I'm no messiah, have never had any desire to save the world. I'd be perfectly happy to steal away with her to some remote cabin in Montana for the rest of our lives, or a tiny oasis forgotten so deep in the middle of the Sahara that no country remembers it. She would sunburn there, though. And she would never let me run away from this, not now. Once I would have been tempted. Hell, two years ago I would have run.

How can she not want to run now? After everything that's happened to her, she'd be well within her rights to cry pax and walk away. I love her because after everything, she won't walk away, but it worries me, too. Especially now. Doing the right thing, even when it's hard, especially when it's terrifying, is admirable. But having no fear of it, having no fear of death isn't normal. I've seen what she has to be afraid of, fought her fears myself.

It isn't just the acid, either. There was something different about her tonight, an otherness and centeredness I've only seen in the kinds of men who hide themselves away in mountaintop monasteries and accept fate because there really is nothing else in their world but air and sky, a thin line between this life and nothingness anyway. She's always been a self-possessed, but not like that. Inside her mind, I understood why, and now I worry that it's not what I may have jostled loose, but what Bell wrought while he was in there. That was a man who didn't fear death, but only because he'd found a way to cheat it.

Next to me, she mumbles sleepily and shifts closer, curling close. "You're thinking. I can feel it from here."

"There's a lot to think about," I answer softly, turning to embrace her.

"In the morning," she whispers, tucking her head in the crook of my neck, breathing deeply.

"Okay, sweetheart." If she can be this calm in the face of apocalypse, I'll set my own fears aside and put on a brave face beside her, and we'll do what needs to be done.


End file.
